The present invention relates to a flat gasket, in particular an intake elbow gasket for an internal combustion engine, with projecting sealing parts, in particular sealing beads, that are provided for producing a defined pressure.
Known flat gaskets of this general type are used in particular for sealing three and more components that are to be sealed and that abut against one another at right angles, at an acute angle, or at an obtuse angle. In the corner region of the components, the compressibility of this known flat gasket can no longer compensate for the frequently occurring large displacements of components, which displacements occur in unfavorable cases due to the addition of shaping and positional tolerances of the individual components. It has been attempted to compensate for these shaping and positional tolerances by applying a sealing paste prior to assembly of the flat gasket. This measure involves considerable manual work, dosing problems, handling problems with the viscous and tacky sealing paste, and the danger that the sealing paste is smeared on the components. Therefore, such additional measures are unsuitable in mass production.
Flat gaskets are also known, in which sealing beads of elastomeric material were applied to the surface of the gasket to achieve a higher compression displacement. However, in this case, the height of the sealing beads is a few tenths of a millimeter, since with an excessive height, the sealing beads melt at the time of heat treatment and very wide sealing beads have a break in height below the boundary heights in the zenith of curvature.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to construct a flat gasket of this type in such a way that in addition to the necessary basic compressibility for standard sealing, additional compressibility is achieved that is locally many times higher.